Dennis Ritchie, Co-Creator of Unix OS, Dies at 70

The creator of C programming language and co-creator of the UNIX operating system, Dennis Ritchie, is dead at the age of 70 due to unspecified illness.

The news of his demise was declared by Rob Pike, a past collaborator.

In his message on Google+ Pike wrote, “ I trust there are people here who will appreciate the reach of his contribution and mourn his passing appropriately. He was a quiet and mostly private man, but he was also my friend, colleague, and collaborator, and the world has lost a truly great mind."

Ritchie, along with Ken Thompson, received the Turing Award in 1993, the IEEE Hamming medal in 1990, the National Medal of Technology in 1999 and most recently, the Japan Prize for Information and Communication in 2011 for developing the UNIX operating system.

UNIX was the result of a desire to create a simpler, cleaner operating system as a reaction to the “big system syndrome” which captured the contemporary operating systems.

UINX was written in C programming language which later became the language for systems, application and embedded programming.

Ritchie once mentioned that, “C is quirky, flawed and an enormous success.” To date, it is one of the most popular languages in the world.